New season is starting for me

 I am a little behind this year but it seems like it has been a very busy spring and early summer.  We just got back from a fantastic vacation in St. Louis and now that work has wound down I am starting to get that bug again.

So on Memorial Day weekend I went down to the farm and after killing about 300 chickens I took a shovel and some plastic into the woods and dug two "water holes."  Nothing fancy just two 6x6 holes lined with some painter plastic.  I then covered the plastic with dirt.  I don't know if it will work because it hasn't rained a significant amount since but I did put a camera up over one of them and as you can see it has peaked interest anyway. 

One thing I have noticed is that the bucks are way ahead of last year as far as growth goes.   I don't know if its the mild winter and spring or what but these pictures are  a good month ahead of what they have been in the past.  This camera is on a narrow treeline that comes out of the sanctuary.  I dug the "water hole" but also took the chainsaw and cleared the center of it out to make it more appealing for them to travel.  I left the edges but made it more like a tunnel.  I will also have a stand up 20 yards from this camera location.

June 5 and this buck has his brows and a very good amount of growth.  Really nice looking buck.

 This is a small buck but I thought it was a cool picture.  Here you can see the "water hole" to the left.  Also notice in all these pictures the bucks are coming in from the right side.  You can see the sanctuary in the background across the open field that is where they are coming from.  Notice most pictures are in the morning.  They bed down in there at night and they are moving out.  

 The next set of  pictures is pretty awesome.  This is a bachelor group of four bucks and the most potential I have seen in a long time.  I think every one of these is a shooter and there are a couple of them that are really looking great with some pretty serious mass.

The first one is this lead buck look how much growth he already has on June 10 its pretty awesome.  Also really nice mass.

 The second I thought was a bigger one is the buck that is now farther to the left in this photo......

 Here he is the closest with his head down......

 Here he is the closest again.  He has a lot of potential really good mass...notice the one buck is standing in my water hole.

 This is the final photo of the sequence.  My camera is set to take photos every 1 minute so notice that each picture is a minute after the other.  I hope one of these guys decides to stick around come October/November. 

 Hard to say if this buck was in the bachelor group above or not because there is quite a time between the pictures.  However, even though its blurry you can see he has a nice rack growing as well.

This wasn't all the pictures I had a lot of smaller bucks and does but it was really interesting to me how much attention they were giving the water hole even though its bone dry.  I need some rain as does my brother-in-law for his crops.  I put some minerals out at this spot and another so that should keep them coming into this area and hopefully we get some rain and I can see if the water hole idea will work.  I have plans of hanging two more stands down there and then its just a matter of not screwing things up and not getting to close and screwing things up.

More pictures to come.